Wonderful day. Poet Edward Hirsch came to Vanderbilt for a reading, and was gracious enough to lead the first half of our forms class. Ed had some great things to say about his use of the quatrain (as per Mark's leading) and also told a number of really enlightening stories concerning his composition process.
A couple of hours later, at the reading, he gave an awesome performance, and read two new unpublished poems that I absolutely loved. I think one of them was a villanelle. He followed with a Q & A session where he had some rather shocking and enlightening things to say about the state of poetry as a cultural fixture in the US as opposed to old world countries. After, he signed my copy of his new selected poems and thanked me for asking him about his use of the iambic pentameter line.
The evening concluded with several drinks and a rather in depth talk about the shift from the Victorians to the moderns to the postmoderns, and how this has affected the general inclusion of poetry into the culture of the United States.
To sum it up: great day. I love these people and the art I've chased.
